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My Search for Meaning, Part 1

If you haven't read this week's Volcano, feel free to catch up here.

My old friend and longtime reader Scott chided me for being "accommodationist" in my article "Rise of the New Atheism." Well, he's right. Unfortunately, what often happens in mass media writing is I have to treat both sides as if they're equally correct so nobody gets his or her feelings hurt. That way I seem more understanding and the Volcano doesn't risk losing a potential advertiser. It happens in the national news, too. Campbell Black once derided it as the trap of "false equivalence." But in the real world, not all ideas have equal merit, and it'd be kinda fun to say so.

So y'know what? I will. Not all ideas have equal merit. Creationism, for example, does not have equal merit with evolution as a scientific theory. It just doesn't. The latter has a mountain of evidence, the former has wishful thinking and a stubborn refusal to catch up with the cutting edge of the late nineteenth century. For a second example, not all talking points about moral issues have equal merit.

I know several of you were annoyed, perhaps even offended, by my take on abortion. I won't even try to talk you out of that. As I said before, if you think abortion is exactly the same as killing a baby, then you should be up in arms. But in the first trimester, I don't. That's my opinion. I'm responsible for drawing my own conclusions, same as you are, and that's the opinion I hold for now. I'm open to persuasion one way or another. But before you bring up a "potential person" argument ("It doesn't matter how complex or self-sufficient the organism is, it will be a person in the future"), keep in mind: Contraception prevents "potential people," yet most sexually active Protestants use it constantly. Exactly how far back are we willing to extend potential personhood? Would I be murdering a baby if I had sex with a woman while she's on the Pill? Or does personhood begin earlier, when I drive to her house? What about when I kiss her, or first ask her out? Is it already murder? Folks, this isn't the freakin' Terminator.

You either think that collection of cells is a person, right then, right there in the doctor's office, or you don't. That's the dividing line between murder and not-murder. And while I don't expect you to change your opinion to match mine--I can't emphasize that enough--you also don't have the right to insist your personal opinion on this subject should be enforced as federal law. There are simply too many opinions about when life begins for anyone to claim they hold inarguable universal truth. After all, if the Pope is right, most Protestants are murderers, many times over. Who's to say?

Enough about that. My point about abortion in the last blog entry was really just an element in my larger argument; namely, that we base our ethics on who we consider our kin--not on anything in our religion. That's why we can all read the same Bible but still derive widely differing ethical standards when it comes to abortion, gay rights, military aggression, the death penalty, and so on. It's also why nineteenth-century people on both sides of the slavery issue used the Bible to justify their opposing beliefs. When the New Atheists say you don't need to believe in the word-for-word truth of the Bible to be an ethical person, they're not just guessing. Most atheists are good people, at least as good as most Christians and far less hypocritical. In fact, I could make a compelling case that atheists' ethics are sometimes nobler in that they're based on moral philosophy and logic, not "because the Bible told us to" or out of fear of some torturous afterlife scenario.

Not that I fault Christians for being hypocritical, by the way--there's no way any Christian could possibly follow every last moral commandment in the Bible, yet they're expected to act as if they've done so or risk serious trouble. That situation makes anyone crazy. Trust me, I know from personal experience. I was a "bad Jehovah's Witness" and "leading a double life" all through high school. How the hell could I not? Don't ever lie! Don't ever hurt someone's feelings! Don't ever think about sex! Don't ever doubt the book of Genesis! Don't forget to study every word of the Bible! Don't contemplate the contradictions in the Bible! Insist they're not there! Love your non-Witness neighbors! Abhor their behavior! Mock their doctrinal discrepancies! Don't even think about yours!

Oh, my God! It can't be done, by you or me. In fact, I'm so glad I don't have to try anymore! I just have to be the best version of myself I can learn how to be. I owe that to the world and myself. It doesn't matter whether I owe it to God, because I owe it to you.

Like me, Frank Schaeffer was raised in an evangelical, fundamental Christian faith, so I empathize with his difficult progression away from all that toward a more logical and, ultimately, more rewarding idea of God. Thanks again to the reader who mentioned Schaeffer's work, as I greatly enjoyed his book Patience with God and recommend it to all of you. I wanted to share a few more passages--hopefully they'll whet your appetite. "I can't prove this," he writes..

"...but I think that any person who remains a 'professional Christian' in the evangelical/fundamentalist world for a lifetime, especially any pastor, risks becoming an atheist and/or a liar. Such individuals put on an act of certainty. Sooner or later they become flakes faking it, or quit. Worse yet, some just stop asking questions. The very fact that a preacher can fool others when he or she has so many doubts makes the self-appointed mediator of faith the deepest cynic of all if, that is, he or she doesn't embrace paradox.

"If you have to be correct all the time, while knowing that you are wrong most of the time, you become an actor. Been there, done that. If you think that to 'be a Christian' means you have to identify with a club you loathe, you'll have to choose to redefine your faith or lose it--even if it costs you a paycheck and your 'good' life."

Yeah, Schaeffer and I are on the same page in many ways. I like him. Patience with God is a thoughtful and unabashedly emotional record of one man's struggle to find useful meaning from Christianity after the fundamentalist nonsense he was taught as a child. I think many of us can identify with him, whether we're ready to admit that or not. If you can, by the way, I don't think it automatically makes you an atheist or even an agnostic. It just means you're being honest with yourself and, if you're in a position where you can be, others.

Another reader commented that by questioning whether Jesus's resurrection really happened exactly the way the Gospels say it did (in their contradictory way, of course), I deny "the truth and power of Jesus." Well...sort of. I am questioning whether everything in the New Testament is true, and I certainly question Jesus's alleged superpowers. Look, if you come to court to claim your Hispanic neighbor Jesus stole your lawn furniture, the judge is going to need more than just your word for it. No matter how sincere you look, anecdotal evidence isn't convincing evidence. Now imagine how much more proof the judge would need if you claim your Hispanic neighbor stole your lawn furniture after returning from the dead. Do you really think a few vaguely similar "eyewitness accounts" would do the trick? "No, we swear, Your Honor, honest!"

I understand why skepticism about the resurrection of Christ freaks Christians out, though. They need him to be alive. They need him to be working on their behalf. They need Christ the Riz to be their Lord and Master, King of Kings. I don't. First of all, I don't believe the Adam and Eve story, so I don't believe the silly idea that sin is passed down genetically like cystic fibrosis. I can't understand how Christ being tortured to death, tragic though it was, did anything to alleviate our suffering or reduce our imperfections. When I ask Christians how one injustice fixes our problems, especially since it's abundantly clear we're all still really imperfect two thousand years later no matter how much we "believe," I get weird fuzzy answers that don't agree or, frankly, make a lick of sense.

What I need from Jesus is an ethical framework, and I got that, completely. I don't need a savior. From what? I'm as human, as good or evil, as any Christian I ever met. If "getting saved" actually reduced sin, the most avowedly Christian states would have the lowest crime rates. They don't. They'd have the lowest teen pregnancy rates. They don't. They'd have the lowest poverty rates, as Jesus spoke again and again about charity to the poor. They don't. Quite the contrary, in fact. Am I wrong?

Which brings us to this wonderful idea that religion and science are equally valid ways to learn about the world. Well, let's consider. We've already agreed religious people aren't more moral or ethical than nonreligious people. Do they understand the world better? You tell me. If the Church had had its way, what would our understanding of the universe be? The Church fought the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun. WRONG. The Church fought surgery on the grounds that the body's interior is God's inviolate property. WRONG. The Church thought slavery was moral (as did the writers of the Bible, by the way, in both the Old and New Testament). WRONG. The Church thought women were inferior to men. WRONG. The Church thought being gay was a deliberate choice, therefore a sin. WRONG. Exactly what did the Church get right?

Look, I'm not saying science has a perfect track record, nor that it always makes the most ethical choices. But I'll stack its résumé up against religion's any day of the freakin' week.

The Christians I talked to said religion is still necessary because science is the search for facts, while religion is the search for meaning. And that sounds lovely. Truth be told, I let it slide in the article. But y'know what? As pretty as it sounds, that idea doesn't hold much weight, either. For most Christians, religion "means" God made us perfectly, then watched helplessly as His perfect creations somehow made a mistake, then cursed our entire species with mortality as punishment for what two newborn people did, then killed everyone on Earth except one single family, then decided the only way He could end sin was to allow His first and favorite son to be tortured to death, then watched for two thousand more years while sin and death kept right on happening...I mean, holy crap, Gentle Reader, where exactly is all this MEANING I'm supposed to appreciate?

I ask again: What exactly is the MEANING of religion? Is it that God loves us? He has a funny way of showing it. Is it that He wants us to be good? He hasn't set an example; on the contrary, the God of the Bible is a jealous, racist, misogynist, homophobic, mass murdering bully. Best case scenario, He changed His mind after all these Old Testament atrocities and set up the death of His son to correct them, a gambit which accomplished not one noticeable improvement in the world. I have to confess, friends, I find myself at a loss. I grant you science doesn't offer much in the way of MEANING, but at least whatever meaning it does offer makes sense.

Okay, BUT! But, but, but! That's only if the Bible is true, right? Let's see what Schaeffer has to say about that:

Evangelical/fundamentalists have bought into an idea that my mother used to phrase as a dire warning: 'If you pick and choose between verses in the Bible, the whole thing will unravel! If it's not all true, none of it is!' Because picking and choosing is what thinking is, thinking becomes a threat. Who knows where asking questions might lead? And that is why all so-called evangelist/fundamentalist intellectual activity has such a hollow ring to it. It begins with its 'answer' and then twists itself into knots trying to justify the conclusion."

Every Christian picks and chooses between verses in the Bible. Let me say that again. Every Christian picks and chooses between verses in the Bible. After all, Christian readers, you don't abstain from shellfish or pork. You don't sacrifice livestock or stay home on the Sabbath. You shave your beard. You never stone anyone for adultery, even those really adulterous adulterers. You revile. You make graven images. You disrespect your parents. By the time you're done shrugging away verses you don't like, all that's left are the Gospels (especially John 3:16, for some reason) and the platitudes of the Psalms. You've read so little of your sacred book so carelessly, you had no idea it changes its mind about what happens in the afterlife several times (Ecclesiastes 9:5). You didn't know it says Judas died two different ways (Matthew 27:5, Acts 1:18), or that two different people were said to have killed Goliath (2 Samuel 21:19). The sad truth is, I know the Bible better than most Christians, and I have to tell you, the best thing you can do if you want to believe every word of the Bible is don't read every word of the Bible.

So religion, at least the Christian religion, offers a book full of ignorant "science," abominable "morals," contradictory "history," inconsistent promises for the afterlife including eternal damnation as God's "just" punishment for a few short decades of imperfection, and a "meaning" that doesn't make any sense or address any of our actual problems in life. Count me out. If we're talking about the God of the Bible, I'm an atheist, out and proud. The choice between present-day science and present-day organized religion is not a choice between two equally true or useful propositions, no matter how I had to play it in the pages of the Weekly Volcano.

So why am I still talking about all this? Why even question whether there's any such thing as a "higher truth" in the Universe? I mean, haven't I already made up my mind against it? It sure sounds like it, right?

Not so fast, Gentle Reader...

(To be continued...)

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